Wednesday, January 16. 2008

I just do OpenLDAP. We've benchmarked it on Itaniums at Intel's request in the past. This is just another benchmark for us, and my only motivation is to see my code run as fast as possible on a given platform.

I should point out that all of the code used in my tests is freely available to anyone, and the machine configurations were all provided as well. Anybody can set up the same environments and duplicate the results I obtained. As with all of our previous tests, all of our data and software configs are available for download to anybody who wants them. As much as possible of the software was identical across all machines, at least at the source code level. Yet another nice thing about working with open source -- you can't hide. If we rigged the results, any third party could easily expose whatever trickery.

In hindsight, I probably should have also benchmarked the Intel binary on the AMD machine and vice versa, to see how much impact the compiler options had. I may give that a try later. We also have a Sun 5120 due to arrive in a week or two (Niagara 2 system), which will be interesting.